By Isabelle Bousquette

Bank of New York Mellon Corp, also known as BNY, on Wednesday announced a multiyear relationship with artificial intelligence heavyweight OpenAI.

Under the deal, America's oldest bank will gain access to cutting-edge OpenAI tools such as Deep Research and its most advanced reasoning models, supercharging the bank's internal AI platform, Eliza. In return, OpenAI said it hopes to gain insight into how well its models work for complex tasks in the real world.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

"We feel AI has transformational power and will be part of every product and service," said Sarthak Pattanaik, head of BNY's AI hub.

Banks are emerging as early leaders in AI adoption and as top-filers in AI patents, as well as top tech-talent recruiters plucking researchers from academic institutions.

OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap attributes that to the industry taking advantage of stark opportunities to simplify complex workflows. OpenAI boasts existing deals with companies like Morgan Stanley, Spanish bank BBVA and Swedish fintech Klarna.

"We've felt a lot of pull and a lot of demand there. I don't suspect that's going to let up," he said, adding the BNY collaboration is also an opportunity to jump in with a company advanced on the AI maturity curve. BNY launched its Eliza platform last year.

Eliza functions as both a chatbot trained on BNY knowledge and a platform where employees can select from a range of publicly available models to build AI tools and agents for specific use cases. All 52,000 employees have access, and over 50% of them actively use Eliza. They have built tools like a lead generation app for salespeople.

Through the deal, BNY will also gain access to ChatGPT Enterprise, OpenAI's plan aimed at large companies.

ChatGPT Enterprise has some overlapping capabilities with Eliza, but BNY will lean on complementary ones, giving licenses to a select number of users, including developers, product owners, and business leaders who will use it to explore cutting-edge features from OpenAI.

The features include Deep Research, an agent that can take in large amounts of online information to complete multistep research tasks, and Operator, which can access the internet through its own browser and click, scroll and type as a person would. Operator is in early research preview, but will be available for ChatGPT Enterprise at some point.

The major value of the collaboration will be BNY's access to OpenAI's application programming interfaces, or APIs, which will give Eliza access to OpenAI's most advanced reasoning models, Lightcap said. And as capabilities like Deep Research and Operator become available via APIs in the future, BNY will be able to integrate them directly into Eliza as well.

"BNY has already built an amazing internal product here, and so we're kind of just drafting off the work they've already done and trying to figure out how our new models, our reasoning models and the like, can continue to extend the capabilities of that platform," Lightcap said.

Write to Isabelle Bousquette at isabelle.bousquette@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 26, 2025 10:00 ET (15:00 GMT)

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